


Cuckoo's Cry

by Satori



Category: Naruto
Genre: Child Soldiers, Family Feels, Gen, Mother and Daughter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2017-12-04 19:49:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/714429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satori/pseuds/Satori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a Village Hidden in the Leaves, and Secrets Hidden in the Village.  Nothing is innocent, not even the children playing in the streets, the little girls giggling among the rosebushes.</p><p>Ino and Sakura have rapidly become inseparable, as close as sisters.  Their mothers are close comrades after years visiting the hospital together, as a coma-bound Sakura slept, and in the next bed over, Ino's twin sister Tsukina wasted away.  With Tsukina gone and Sakura at long last restored to the waking world, the world moves on, with two budding kunoichi sisters on the path yet again.  Is this Fate?  Is this Fortune?  </p><p>This is the Village Hidden in the Leaves - for they cast long shadows as they fall to the ground.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beyond the Pale - Yukari Yamanaka

_The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little Magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of Magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, and the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.  I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak._

_There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead._

-C.S. Lewis, [The Abolition of Man](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm)

****

Part 1: Beyond the Pale - Yukari Yamanaka

****

Your firsts are not something you forget. The first time you killed, on a mission in Tea Country that went poorly from the start and ended with all your teammates in the hospital and the blood of a kunoichi from Iwa, probably only a year or two younger than yourself, all over your clothes; you stayed up late that night, scrubbing futilely. The first time you made love; to your husband under a full moon, on your wedding night; and how lucky were you that it was such an idyll -you know how few kunoichi are so fortunate. The first and only time you gave birth, the cries of your beautiful twin daughters cutting through the haze of pain a dizziness like a Futon jutsu through fog.

And that ushered in a whole new set of firsts. The first time you woke in the middle of the night with nightmares of your precious children screaming in pain and terror, only to find that they are indeed screaming, but only for milk and attention. The first time your child smiled at you and called you "mama." The first time you rushed a pale, shallowly breathing little girl to the hospital, fear gnawing at you until you wondered how you were still on your feet. The first time you watched your daughter, a prodigy, if anything, mold her chakra, and tasted the subtle sensation of her unique chakra signature. The first time you had to explain to your daughter why she couldn’t go with her sister. The first time you buried a child.

There are some things you never want a first of, let alone a second or third.

And yet you must bear the burdens life casts upon you; persevere even when your heart is in tatters.   _Kodomo no tame ni_ , you remember your mother whispering with a sigh before she cried herself to sleep, cuddling you in the bed her husband was so often absented from by duty.   _For the sake of the children_.  They are beautiful, painfully beautiful, children, your baby girls.  One a blur of activity, always venturing ahead utterly heedless of dangers, the other looking on with longing as her body betrays her, descending into greater and greater degeneration, failing from the periphery inwards until she needs assistance even to breathe. The hospital becomes a fixture of your life, and you wonder how it is that it doesn't strangle you and Ino as much as it does Tsukina.

You assume it must be the vivacity and energy if unbridled youth, Ino never letting despair creep into any nook or corner; she is always smiling, always dancing, always telling stories. She lives enough for two, playing the games her sister can't, but always making sure to include her by jokes and anecdotes and imagination. You only later realize that you should have wondered why it was that Tsukina never raged against the unjust world, never resented her sister's wholeness, never resigned herself to tears of despair. But you were busy counting your blessings.

You first met Minase Haruno at the library, browsing through the mythology section. Fitting, really, that you would meet amidst myths shaded by the mists of time and inhabited by restless spirits, for they would dominate every aspect of your association. Troubled spirits of daughters who do not lie easy, however they lie: pale on white sheets in half-lit hospital rooms. After a while the hospital staff just put little Sakura and Tsukina in the same room, since you'd developed the habit of visiting the hospital together, as if leaning on each other for strength.

In truth, she was a stronger woman than you, for all that you were a battle-hardened Kunoichi and she a soft-spoken teacher of children. She watched your children laugh and talk and live, while hers slept, pale as a ghost, dead to the world around her. She made bento for Ino and folded paper chrysanthemums for Tsukina, and never spoke so much a word of her yearning to do as much for her own daughter. She delighted in Ino's precociousness almost as much as you did, and imparted to her all the joy of the world of legend and literature that your clan and professional obligations never let you so deeply explore.

It was from her that you heard the ancient folk-wisdom of cultures long ago and far away, much of it false and detached from the world, and yet beautiful even it's dark lies and fanciful ignorance. From her that you heard about the Painted Skin, worn by a demon-princess to deceive all but the most sharp-eyed priest into believing her a helpless young woman. You listened to the story of the Briar Rose, cursed to sleep in the heart of a village walled in by thorns until a lover's kiss woke her. You shook your head at the wild tribes that murdered the younger twin of any birth, believing that a birth imparted only enough life for one, and that one must be culled that the other might live, else the second child would be a parasite dooming her sister to death.

You only remembered in retrospect how much these stories enthralled Ino, how she tilted her head in thought even long after the telling, how she glanced thoughtfully at her sisters, for she had come to call Sakura a sister as well, on their beds. How she was a prodigy who, in childish bravado, dared trespass where wiser heads dared not even consider.

There are always child prodigies in a hidden village; they are practically cultivated. The pride of a clan, the distilment of genetics and teaching down to single precocious child who surpasses all expectations. You still remember that Ino had been hailed as one, though few if any remember that. She didn't live up to her early promise after all, or so older and more sagacious minds have decreed.

You know, however, that a child prodigy of the secretive Yamanaka clan would never show her hand easily. You know that Ino was molding chakra in patterns that would be called justu if they had any discernible effect at an age when even most children of shinobi clans are still struggling with chakra control exercises. And in your darker days, you know that Ino, your dear sweet little girl, shows none of her early promise because she would shock those lofty elder minds to the core if she ever revealed how she had developed her talents.

It's a terrible thing when a mother must carry the darkest suspicions about her daughter, but you've never been one to hem and haw, to make circumlocutions and dance around the subject. The long and short of it is - your daughter is a monster, and God help you, you love her. So you keep your peace, and try not to dwell on it.

As if any mother could avoid dwelling on the darkness that now shrouds her own child, children, the blossoms of her heart.

Ino still laughs, still bubbles over with playfulness. But there’s a guardedness around her now, a wary awareness of others around her. Even your husband thinks it is because she lost her sister, her twin who finally succumbed to the disease that had savaged her for all of her too short life. You know better. You watch Ino play with her best friend Sakura, and you see no sorrow, no tears for Tsukina. You see two girls as close as sisters, sharing secrets and stories and summer nights under the moon. It is as though Sakura woke and stepped right into the place Tsukina left. It is exactly as though.

It first becomes evident to you in the small things. Unconscious gestures, such as the direction Sakura looks in conversation -always at Ino, without the glances at her mother to check for her approval such as you know to expect from almost all young children. The way Sakura is so eager to try things that Ino suggests, as though new to them, even though some of them are things she has done before, in her own home, with her own mother. The way Sakura seems to know the customs and quirks of your household without needing to be told, how she even absently calls you mother now and then, when she’s not paying attention.

You tell yourself that the unthinkable couldn’t possibly be, that Sakura is very much Minase’s daughter, with her love of books and careful, meticulous nature, so antithetical to the aggressive desire for exploration your daughters shared. But then you remember her odd mood swings, her immediate and insistent adoption of Tsukina’s ragdoll collection over her mother’s protests, and the sudden intuitive understanding of horticulture that seems to have come out of thin air for a girl who had never before shown much liking for live plants or wet soil. You notice how Sakura occasionally seems almost bewildered at her own strawberry blond locks, can’t seem to remember her birthday, and rubs absently at a scar that isn’t there - it’s carved into the skin Tsukina no longer has. . . or would it be truer to say, no longer wears?

You remember that Ino pestered her father about the family mind techniques long before she should have been able to even understand them, and yet asked so many penetrating questions about them that he had to fob her off with a few scrolls and a promise to train her when she grew older. You remember that Ino was very much the child prodigy, and brilliant almost beyond belief. You remember that she was never told the dangers that lurked like pitfalls in the use of mind jutsu. You remember Minase’s stories about the Devil’s Bargain, and how everything comes at a cost.

And you fear for your daughters’ souls.

Yet you keep your peace, what tattered fragments of it you have left, because you love your daughter, daughters, little monsters, whatever they are, and you will go to the ends of the earth for them. You will even sit down to tea with Minase, and somehow, somehow, nod, and smile, and say nothing of your suspicions. Even though her sympathy for Tsukina is more a caustic burn than a balm to your heart, even though her joy in her daughter is a stain of shame on your soul, even though even looking her in the eye is an abjuring of your honor. You can offer her nothing but pain, and so you keep it to yourself.

So when your husband brings up training for Ino, you encourage him to let her have her childhood, to let her play rather than learn to kill, to violate, to destroy. She's only a child and already as tarred with malice as you are as a veteran kunoichi. You do not think you could bear to see her lose what little innocence she might yet have. If she has any left.

You are afraid to ask. That's also a first for you, God help you.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some people felt that this first chapter worked best as a stand alone. If you think so, feel free to stop reading here. I will upload additional chapters however, giving you more of the story from other character's viewpoints.


	2. Paying the Piper - Minase Haruno

Cuckoo's Cry

 

_When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson’s remark that the élan vital is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics._

 

\- C.S. Lewis, [The Weight of Glory](http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf).

 

Part 2: Paying the Piper - Minase Haruno

 

You don't question a miracle, except when you do.

 

As a teacher of literature, you know the old legends, the mythic patterns that seem to repeat throughout the history of humankind, whether in fact or fiction. You know that miracles, sudden turns of fortune, tragedies being reversed -such things rarely come without price. And if you try to peek behind the veil, the weaver goddess is snatched up back to heaven, leaving the cowherd bereft. What are miracles but the capricious gifts of fate or divinity, whimsical grace that may be here today and gone tomorrow? How can you dare question when that mercy might be withdrawn at the least sign of impiety? Orpheus looked back and lost Eurydice forever.

 

So you don’t dwell on why. This is what matters: After so long, after years of tears and regrets and self-flagellation, you have your precious cherry blossom back. Where once she was a pale figure swaddled in blankets far too reminiscent of a burial shroud, she is now haloed in sunlight, dancing under the clear blue skies that have so long been denied her. She has come home from a long journey into the shadowed valley between dreams and death. After so long in the darkness, dead in all but name to a world that spun on around her, carried on without her, went by past her, she is alive again. She was lost, but now is found.

 

How can you but rejoice in, revel in, this reunion? The long night is fading, a new day is dawning. The apartment is no longer oppressively empty, bereft as it was of the sound of laughter and song and bare running feet on wooden boards. The fragrance of fresh flowers and girl’s shampoo and cooking for more than a solitary widow fill the rooms. It is a joy to welcome home your daughter, and know that you will do so again tomorrow, when she runs back from playing in the Yamanaka’s flower gardens after school, eager to share her new experiences with you. That you will come home from teaching the children of others, to teach your own, and to learn from her, to watch her grow into a woman, to someday initiate her into the mysteries of womanhood.

 

But life has a way of not ever being so simple, nor so easy as you hoped. Like a honeymoon, the carefree days go by quickly, too quickly, and you must buckle down to a changed life, a changed family, a changed Sakura. Sakura is a girl out of time, two years removed from her age cohort by her coma. She may be of an age and height with her classmates, but her long confinement to bed has left her muscles atrophied and unsure, and her years of disconnect from society have made her no less awkward socially. There’s not much for her to catch up with academically; Sakura takes after you in love of literature and learning, and even a two-year handicap is but a minor digression in her quest to understand, at least in the classroom, where she is again ahead of the class within the month. But good books and good marks and a teacher’s approving nod are faint comfort against the suspicion and coldness and jealousy of the other girls her age.

 

Ino is her bulwark against the petty cruelties of children who attack what they find alien. Ino takes Sakura under wing like a mother hen, with ferocious protectiveness that returns every bruise or slight or mocking comment fourfold. It’s what she did for Tsukina, Yukari tells you, when Tsukina’s failing body inspired the cruel and petty among the children to insult or belittle her. She seems relieved that Ino has latched on to Sakura in place of her departed sister, instead of folding into herself in grief. There’s something vaguely uncomfortable to you about how Ino has simply adopted Sakura, and gave her the place that Tsukina once held, but you love that girl almost as much as your own daughter after  months of being cheered by her smile and innocently uttered reassurances. So you put up only a token protest at Sakura’s adoption of Tsukina’s truly atrocious ragdoll collection, and make Ino as welcome in your home as in her own. She’s the faith and strength and joy of both families, always believing that clear skies are not far off and taking care of her sisters, whether of her own blood or not. But you can’t help but begrudge her a little, who has usurped part of your daughter’s affections from you.

 

You tell yourself that Sakura is a growing girl who must leave the nest someday, and that you can’t keep her forever. It is enough that you can see her laugh and cry and thrive amidst all life brings, good and bad. But you can’t shake the feeling that there’s yet a cost to be assessed for your fortune, a ransom owed for the return of your daughter. The myths always bring back the agent of fate or magic or divinity, with a promise to be fulfilled or a price to be paid, whether gold or service or firstborn. But the stories exact that expense when the hero has grown to adulthood, ready to assume responsibilities and fulfill oaths. You have forgotten that you live in the Village Hidden in the Leaves, which takes its annual tithe of children, to replace the toll of death and disability on the duty rosters.

 

The day Sakura comes home talking excitedly of Ninja Academy your heart almost stops. It’s the first fight you’ve had since your daughter was returned to you; you can’t bear to have her taken away again so soon. You know you overreacted, but your fear overwhelms all else, and when Yukari shows up at your door to ask why Sakura has run into her kitchen, sobbing as she never has since before her coma, you scream that she has stolen your daughter from you. For the first time since you have known her, you see that stolid Kunoichi façade crack. You see her cheeks bleach, worry lines etch her face, her eyes flash with long suppressed emotions. She gapes at you, speechless, until she sees the crumpled parchment in your hand, with the wax seal of the Great Tree still visible on the bottom of the sheet. Her mouth and face close then, and she turns on her heel and leaves without a word.

 

It’s several angry hours of destroying your carefully decorated sitting room, and several more putting everything back in order, before you come to terms with yourself. To be entirely honest, you saw this coming a ways off; you just never wanted to believe it. Never wanted to even contemplate losing your daughter again; in so many ways. Losing her time to the Academy's demands, her affection to the Village's, and perhaps someday, a day far too soon, however late it may come, her life. In peace, a wise man once said, sons bury their fathers; but in war, fathers bury their sons. And someday your daughter, the light of your life, may come home to you, not with a smile and a hug, but in a bag or a box or worse of all, in a plain unmarked envelope containing a bleached white note card with a pro forma expression of regret printed neatly on it.

 

And so, because you cannot bear to think on that horrible, all too possible, future too closely, you lashed out at Yukari, as a proxy of her daughter. Because for that one horrible moment, you hated Ino with all your soul, with all the stored up passions of two years’ worth of prison visits to the borderlands of death. You know that Sakura had never been dazzled by the glamour with which Shinobi were portrayed to youth of the village, the prospective recruitment pool. Her reasons for wanting to become a Kunoichi begin and end with Ino, her friend, her confidant, her sister in everything save blood, who she is willing to do anything for.  Even kill.  Even die.  

 

You know that for all her kindness, Ino is, underneath the disarmingly genuine smiles, a Yamanaka through and through. Her life’s journey, her destiny to serve as a ninja, was set long before you met her, sealed in her bones by her upbringing, by the influence of village and clan and parents.  You would not seek to deny that to her, to pry her away from her heritage, to make her something other than what she is.  You know that she as a girl of resolute will, and could not be turned from her course.

 

But you scream and weep and worry for your Sakura, caught in her wake and towed along, helpless against the current.  Unable to turn away because she is _Sakura_ , and she will always be there to watch her best friend's back, whatever the cost. Because that is what friends, what sisters do.  Because that is what you taught her, in word and deed and a thousand of the stories you love. She is your daughter after all, the product of your blood and your upbringing. The origin of her marching orders lies, in large part, within you. You know, in your heart of hearts, that blame is misplaced upon those who welcomed you daughter as though she were of their own flesh and blood.

 

Yukari is sitting alone in her kitchen when you arrive to apologize. You don't need to see her face, only the cant of her shoulders to know that she has been crying. Any why shouldn't she? Has she not borne the burden of worry that you have only just taken up since Ino's birth? Has she not known that she would have to send her girl, girls, beloved children into the face of death from the very beginning? Your formal apology, coached in safe, neutral, terms of familiar honor, seems a thing of gossamer shadows, insubstantial and inadequate.  You are relieved when she doesn’t allow you to finish.

 

"My family," Yukari suddenly says, without turning around, "is steeped in blood." She finally turns to face you, letting you see her tear-reddened eyes. "We don't have to be ninja, not anymore. We’re not living in the desperate days of the Age of Strife, when we were a small clan of little account, living on the scraps the feudal lords deigned to toss us. We could set aside our weapons and jutsu and hita-ite, and become merchants or artisans or farmers. We could leave this shadow world of death and deceit and destruction, without much in the ways of repercussion. But that would mean setting aside our hard won knowledge of the ninja arts, our hallowed traditions, the very identity that we have made for ourselves over the past centuries. And that...  that, we cannot bear. What does that make us, I wonder, in the eyes of God?"

 

"Human, I think." You wrap your arms around her and let her cry into your shoulder.

 

You are mothers, crying for the fallen leaves, already dead even though they have not yet fallen to the ground. You are mothers, cherishing the memories of loved ones who will never die so long as they are remembered. You are mothers, setting the fruit of your wombs and the legacies of your dreams before the wide, dangerous, world, praying that they will be given the chance to blossom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nope, no questions answered here.


	3. Journey of a Thousand Li - Sakura Haruno

_“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'_

_A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”_

\- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces.

 

Part 3: Journey of a Thousand Li. - Sakura Haruno

   Your life has always been about stories.  Your mother, the lover of literature that she was, started to tell you them as soon as you knew words.  And you loved those stories, all of them; the richness of emotion and wonder that they brought.  Stories were how you learned to listen, to speak, to think.  And now your own story has resumed it’s arc, up toward what lofty destiny, you know not.

   And yet sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it’s your story, anymore.  You dimly remember a time before: before the accident, before you lost years to the darkness of dreamless sleep. You knew where you were then, with respect to parents and society. You knew where you had come from, and had a clear, if naïve idea of where you were going. You miss that.  There was a comforting certainty to simply following along with your mother and your classmates and your neighbors wherever the world took you.  Now you have choices both behind and ahead of you, and at every turn something lost, something sacrificed, something set aside for later.   

   You are, perhaps, doing that thing adults call _growing up_.  If this is what it’s like, it’s no wonder that adults seem to miss their childhoods.  You are emerging into your new self, becoming something unexpected and yet inevitable.  And as you develop, you find yourself caught in divided loyalties, contradictory hopes. You love your mother dearly, and can hardly bear the thought of bringing her grief. And yet your heart also cries out for Ino, and you cannot allow her to face the fire alone.  And so you embark on the most perilous, frightening, unsure endeavor of your life with a soul divided.  If you believed in omens, you would think it ill.  To walk into the Ninja Academy of Konoha is to walk under the shadow of doom and destruction, and only those who are whole can hope to face such a thing and emerge unbroken.  And yet, and yet. . .  Ino is the other half of your life, the complement to the melody of your song.  You cannot let her walk into danger without you. Your combined strength will have to see you through where your own heart is faint.

   Your mother has agreed to allow you to enroll in the academy, but you can see the unshed tears behind her eyes. She mourns you already, and perhaps rightly so. Did not some ancient societies consider a youth dead and buried as soon as she entered the military? You wonder how much truth there is in that custom.  You sometimes think that you can already feel the ghostly grasp of the grave upon your skin.  Is your fate already written, an ending appointed for you on some distant field, amidst blood and turmoil and war?  You don’t accept such fatalism, and yet you are afraid.

   You've had a happy, relatively carefree life before this sudden tension between the ones you love; a tension mirrored in your heart, as you weigh all the burdens of obligation and affection that lie heavy on your mind. Even before you have set foot in the academy, you realize, your testing has begun. Reconciling your life up to now with the calling you plan to embrace is the first challenge you must surmount on your path to becoming a Kunoichi. You know that thousands have walked this path before, have successfully navigated its treacherous twists and turns. And yet, you cannot help but wonder how much you can bend before you break. 

   The answer to that question arrives with all the brutality you should have expected of initiation into the mysteries of death and deception.

   Your time away from the world, as you have come to call it, is both a blessing and a curse for a trainee ninja. Your eyes are fresh, without the habits and biases and expectations that blind so many to the subtle secrets that hide in plain sight. But you are also ignorant of so many contextual cues that others habitually pick up on without the need for conscious recognition. Ninja Academy is a struggle, not only to learn what is being taught and not being taught, but also to force your less developed body to move in ways you never even thought of, to adjust to a whole new hidden world of intrigue and violence, and above all, to train your own emotions to achieve that mindset where you can dampen out all the instinct, intuition, and information that isn’t vital to survival, that place where it is just you, obstacles, allies, and targets. You wonder if your time away from society makes that easier for you, changing person to target. It’s not a thought you like to dwell on.

   Chakra molding is usually the hardest skill for ‘white rabbits’ - those who have not been trained by family in preparation for life as a ninja, those who are not inheriting a legacy passed down for generations. You however, find it comes easily to you, naturally even. Ino claims it is because you spent so much time around her and her family – surely you have been picking it up, perhaps without even consciously knowing it. You’re not so sure. There’s a sense of déjà vu about chakra molding, and a number of other tasks you are learning, a tickling at the edge of your memory. If you didn’t think reincarnation was nonsensical, you’d be tempted to wonder if you were a ninja in a past life. For all that it bothers you, you’re not going to complain about anything that gives you an edge - you simply buckle down and work at it with your usually diligence, and you are soon top of the class in chakra manipulation.

   The teachers are impressed.  Ino teases you about it, telling you that she’s jealous of your genius, and that she misses getting that sort of attention.  It’s a surprise to you, the casual way she laughs about the awe of others, as though it’s something she shrugged off herself with the causal smile of hers, the one that puts almost anyone at ease.  It’s a strange thought -she’s brilliant, and you love her, but no one calls her a genius.  Only they used to, you find out, when you ask her father in a rare moment when you are alone with him in the floral boutique that is as much his family’s pride as their unique ninjutsu.  He spins you a tale of the fair haired girl for whose pleasure chakra patterns danced like marionettes on string; whose father was sure she could be taught advanced justu at the tender young age of five, if only she could be convinced to leave her sister’s side long enough to learn them.  

   You can hear the pride in his voice, like your mother’s when your teachers, your other teachers gushed about the speed with which you absorbed their lessons, and you feel a pang of jealousy yourself.  Your mother tries to be supportive, but so much of what you learn is foreign to her.  You miss the casual intimacy of sharing every discovery, every new wonder or revelation with your mother, and hearing about her own insights on the matter.  But you’ve entered a different world, a world of shadows from which few secrets escape.  You wonder if you’ll ever recapture that closeness you had with your mother, and for a moment, your resolve falters.  But then Ino bounds into the room with the noonday sun glinting off her gilded locks and the spring breeze at her back and you find yourself caught in a new adventure, your worries momentarily forgotten.

    Ino has that way of bending the world around her, never seeming to impose her will and yet always getting her way in the end.  You are in awe of her self-assurance.  So it is no surprise that when Suzume-Sensei writes ‘identity’ on the chalkboard and starts speaking about the association between the self-concept and the movements of chakra system, Ino is the first to master the lesson.  It’s the most fundamental of all the chakra arts - developing the unimpeachable sense of who and what one is, that drives the instinctive working of Chakra to augment the body.  To consciously shift momentum perfectly in accord with one’s jumps, kicks, landings, and falls, to reinforce every motion with the flow on chakra - all these tasks would be too much mental effort for a ninja tracking multiple foes and devising stratagems to defeat them.  Basic chakra enhancement has to be automatic, precise, and instant.  Ino, confident, brilliant, and almost preternaturally aware, seems to achieve the standards set by the teacher effortlessly.  

    You, on the other hand, find yourself aching from burning muscles you didn’t even know existed, landing on your face far more times than anyone can countenance with good cheer in public, and driving the teachers to distraction with your seeming inability to let go of conscious effort and achieve what should be naturally attained with a little prodding.  You find yourself, for the first time in your life, in remedial classes.  It’s almost a relief.  Your mother’s laughter and reassurances when you panic over the letter home to inform her is the warmest and closest you have felt her in months.  And you’re not alone in your extra session, a short (even compared to you), loud, blond-haired ball of energy named Naruto keeps you company and, if unintentionally, reassures you that it can’t be that unnatural if you’re not alone in your difficulties.

    The frustration starts to take its toll though.  Ino’s usually light touch, breezy assurances with an even mix of encouragement and deflation of your worries and complaints are, for once, more annoyance than comfort.  You should be able to do this.  When you actively engage your chakra with a foreign pattern, the matrix of intertwined energies practically leaps to do your bidding.  And yet you cannot integrate your adept manipulation of chakra with the innate reflexes that should trigger automatic chakra pattern response even in civilians.  Those who have not honed their chakra networks gain little benefit from such instinctive responses, but even for them, the responses are there, easily detectable by any half competent medi-nin.

    You begin to wonder if your time away from the world changed you somehow, that, when the breath of life returned to you it forgot to wake something vital up.  The doctors assure you of the impossibility of such, but they don’t know why you revived in the first place, so you find yourself wondering just how they would know.  It's an uncomfortable feeling, realizing that the authorities in the field are clueless.  You don't like it - there are few enough certainties in your world as is.  More helpful than the doctors is the remedial instructor, who at least makes you feel like you are doing something; he puts you through a dozen different philosophical takes on the practice of meditation, and even tries, to your mother’s horror and Ino’s bemusement, throwing you into mildly dangerous situations in the hope that stress and adrenaline will awaken dampened survival instincts.  Unfortunately, your overly analytical mind has a very good sense of just how much danger you are actually in, and you have never been prone to panic.  Which is good for your nerves, but not for your mother's; it takes more than a few tries before Mizuki-sensei gives up on the _I’m sure it can be solved like hiccups_ strategy.  

    In the end, you decide that if conventional wisdom is not yielding results, you must resort to unconventional methods.  Ino admits, in an attempt to cheer you up, that  she experimented with what older and wiser minds expressly advised against when she drew the chakra strings and matrices that had given rise to her father’s high but unfulfilled hopes.  Perhaps those who have gone before you don’t know everything.  And you are tired of running face-first into your own mental block yet again.  So, unsure yourself whether it is in desperation or sheer emotional fatigue, you take the plunge into the unexplored depths.  You pay heed to at least this much of the wisdom of your elders - you find a quiet, isolated, uncluttered space to begin your experiment.  Then you throw their every word of advice, caution and instruction out the window.  If your body and mind and chakra network cannot be made to work instinctively, perhaps they can be trained to imitate instinct.  So instead of loosening your focus and your control, you tighten your grasp on the sinuous channels of pulsing energy that have been your bane for weeks.  You trace them down every turn, fork and coil; mapping, analysing, categorizing.  Preparing.  For, when you have this all figured out, you’re going to brute force your way to enlightenment.  Or whatever they call it when you achieve that perfect harmony of intent and action in your chakra system.

    It is, much as you anticipated, a long, difficult, arduous process.  But the promise of real progress at last keeps you at it.  Until one day, alone in your room, in the house, indeed possibly in the whole residential block given that it is Planting Day, you turn the key at the heart of your chakra coils, and energy blossoms like a lotus within you. It feels as though your body is alight with flame, tingling with coiled power ready to leap.  It seems as though you have truly come alive for the first time.  It feels like you can do _anything_.  You leap and you are out the window and soaring for a neighboring roof.  You land and you barely feel the slightest crunch of momentum being absorbed as you half crouch to catch yourself.  Your backflip off the slanted, irregular roof is a perfect half-spin pirouette ending in you lightly landing on the balls of your feet several stories below.  It is an incredible, indescribable feeling; vindication and excitement and euphoria.  It takes moments, so unlike you, for your mind to catch up with the image reflected off of a shaded window next to your landing spot.

    It’s not right.  It’s not _you_.

    Everything shatters as you hands reach up to a face familiar yet wrong, wrong, wrong - your concentration, your confidence, your every conviction.  And panic, long denied it’s prize, comes to collect with a vengeance.  Your perfect but oh so light and fine hold on the arcane forces within you falls to pieces along with everything else, and the fire under your skin goes from warm to scorching in an instant.  

    Sharpness.  Agony.  Darkness.


	4. Part 4: Kindly Stopped For Me - Ino Yamanaka

Cuckoo’s Cry

 

_It should be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good of evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature.  Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy.  They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know.  Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be represented symbolically if that are to be represented at all._

 

_These forms are not only symbolical but were always known to be symbolical by reflective people.  The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful human shapes their sculptors gave them.  In their poetry a god who wishes to "appear" to a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man.  Christian theology nearly always explained the "appearance" of an angel in the same way.  It is only the ignorant, said Dionysius in the fifth century, who dream that spirits are really winged men._

 

_In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated.  Fra Angelico's angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven.  Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity--the frigid houris of a teatable paradise.  They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture, the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying "Fear not."  The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, "There, there."_

 

_\- C.S. Lewis, Preface to the Paper Back Edition, The Screwtape Letters._

 

Part 4: Kindly Stopped For Me - Ino Yamanaka

 

            Strange omens and intuitions are often attributed to twins.   You’ve heard all too many of them, even in the meager years you’ve had.  Even before Minase-Sensei taught you the wisdom of cultures long forgotten by most, you had a wealth of fantasies to draw on.  The whispered superstitions and legends and jokes of the civilian populace were rife enough with tales of twins who knew eachother’s minds so well they acted in perfect concert even when countries apart, who pretended to be each other to avoid suitors or woo a lover, who grew so despondent without the ‘other half of their soul’ at their side that they committed suicide.  The ghost-tales and campaign-stories (one can rarely say which are which) of your ninja kinsfolk are even grander and more outlandish, featuring bodyguard or assassin pairs of beautiful kunoichi who killed as much with glances as blades, or unknowing identical brothers being mistaken for each other and consequently upsetting deals and balances and alliances.  

            Whatever the stories told, however whimsical and impossible they were, they were not stories of the Yamanaka clan.  They were not the tales of the brilliant, mad, unrestrained genius-fools who had delved deeper into the workings of the mind than any had before ventured, or perhaps dared.  Who had honed their chakra systems until they could reach into the furthest recesses of the psyche.  Who went to the line which said ‘thus far, and no further,’ and gleefully stepped over it.  No, the stories told were not your story.  Yours is more daring and more frightening by far.

            The first lesson a child learns is fear.  Fear of the strange, fear of pain, fear of being alone.  You have learned it better than most.  You had much to fear, after all.   You spent year after year under the looming shadow of your sister’s decline.  You knew that you would lose her.   You feared that above all else.   Pain, isolation, and the utter, unthinkable, unfathomable wrongness of not having her with you.  You had neither the desire nor the intent to survive that.  And yet you clung to hope, to life, to those shared tender moments in which all you knew what the radiance of your sisters laughter, all else chased away into shadow.  You would never surrender that, not for anything.  You determined to put everything under scrutiny, desperately seeking an aversion of unkind fate.

             You started with the obvious things.  You learned that when voices hush, the situation has become more _significant_ , for good or ill.  More often, ill, as when the adults huddled away from you to speak of your sister.  So you learned to watch and track the patterns of hushed and worried voices.  You became sensitive enough to nuance to catch word of any change in your sister’s condition before it was spoken - what was writ in mien and tone was enough for you.  That keen perception you developed opened up other knowledge as well.  You could pick out genuine chakra theory from the platitudes and mnemonics that were all that the active-duty family members let you hear when they spoke of jutsu.  You could parse the pauses and tells of conversation well enough to catch even the practiced liars your kinsfolk were.  You traced out the careful image your clan elders ordained for the clan’s public face.   And learned you had yet more to fear.

            You recognized that the reality of myth is not so important as the meaning of it, the influence it plays over the culture that tells it.  You knew that stories could carry purpose: cautionary, instructive, encouraging, affirming.  Minase-Sensei was so very instructive in that regard, as much in what she tried to hide from your tender youthfulness as what she spoke of openly.  While the twin-legends were largely light and fanciful, you saw warnings in the shadows they cast.   People already found twins strange and unexpected - you saw the truth of that in the horror-stories of the doppleganger, of face-stealing spirits and demons that wore human skin.  Always, the fear of the other who bore your face.  Always the fear that a stranger lurked behind the eyes you loved.  Small wonder your clan kept such a tight grip on any knowledge of it’s signature jutsu.  Small wonder it hid its’ face behind the colorful, innocent bloom of flowers in public.. 

            You understood then, well before you could clearly explain your _connection_ to your twin, the other side of yourself; that it was dangerous to let such be known.  There was scant welcome for the strange and uncanny.  So you never explained that when you told Tsukina the story of your day, you used more than words and gestures, those crude symbols that most had to rely on to convey their meaning and emotions.   Your bond with her was more than just thing of similarity and sympathy and long association.  It was a wonder of dreams and passions, and by some ethereal miracle, chakra.  You were as one in a way the most inspired of poets and mystics could scare imagine.  The first time someone commented that Tsukina experienced life beyond her room through you, you flinched.  And then, like a good Kunoichi, you honed your responses so you would never do so again.

            Like a good Yamanaka, you made sure that frightful truth was never seen.  You spun them the story they wanted, expected to see.  You were the happy girl who brought the sunlit joys of the world to your sister’s bedside, and kept out the gloom.   You learned well to keep silent, to hide away in shadows whatever you did not want brought to light.  Who would expect the sun-haired girl with shining smile to deal with the dark?   You were a true scion of a ninja clan; no one questioned your facade.

            It was all too easy to hide behind your sister.  While her body failed and her movements faltered, and even her attention flickered, near the end, there was a strange sort of strength in her weakness.  A sickly girl, you found, was socially and morally unassailable.  Much could be excused when done for her sake.  Adults turned away in embarrassment when you brought her up.  So even as you were her arms and legs and eyes and ears - her connection to the world she was increasingly unable to visit on her own, she was your shield against prying eyes or pointed questions.  The thing you sought for the sake of her sickness; were only made possible by the doors and avenues opened by her frailties.  The irony wasn’t lost on you.  But you would do anything, anything at all for your sister.

            It was a long time before you dared to do more than protect and console her.  Tsukina was a sweet and undemanding girl, without a trace of envy in her.  She wanted only to share in your joys, and was content to stay in your shadow.  She cheered you on as you grew in strength and insight, as you accomplished things that drew a different sort of hush from the elders than worried whispers.  They looked upon your diligence with awe, while you found no merit in their praise.  You were simply living for two, that’s all.  And if you did it with the force and brilliance of two, well, that was your sisters gift and credit.   But while you rose to meet, even exceed, every challenge which came your way, from the time you could walk and speak, there was no triumph in your heart.  You scaled the heights alone.  Tsukina, so brilliant, so full of ideas and wonder, could not be there with you.  Encouragement and accolades were but ash heaped on your head, a crown of sorrows to go with the agony within your soul.  You were one when you should have been two, been more, been whole.  

            You tried to focus on Tsukina’s happiness.  And she was easily delighted, always a warmth at the back of your mind, a companionable presence even in silence.  But as the years bore down on your sister, as she waned, pale and too often alone; the golden days under the sun became a curse on your lips, a weight on your soul.  Why were you the one to be hearty and hale, to run free, to live on?  It was not enough that your sister had only half a life; no, the cruel fates meant to take her from you entirely.  With that harsh doom ever dogging your step, you could find no peace, no rest  in all the universe.

            But where the unwelcome truths of the world were hateful to you, you found solace in the honeyed fancies of places and times themselves become fabled.   You dreamed, as those long-ago ones did, of men who could not die until they were forgotten, and women who reached beyond the bounds of the living to seek their loved ones in a world of ghosts.   The wisdom of your time called such foolishness.   And yet.  And yet, even though fairy-tales were no longer believed, there was another type of myth, another sort of legend.  It was one you had been told; indeed been raised and nourished on.  The tale of the hero, the one of strong will and unbending purpose, who overcame all obstacles to attain the heights.  Or perhaps, plumb the depths.   

            Where wouldn’t you go, what wouldn’t you do for the sister of your blood, the gladness of your heart, the other half of your soul?  Your clan praised you for the speed at which you advanced, the breadth of subtleties you could grasp.  A prodigy.  And so you advanced, and sought, and experimented, far beyond what they would teach you.  Far beyond what they could imagine.   You found the keys to a world beyond even your own imagining.  You mapped the chakra network even deeper into the web of memory and self than those before had even attempted.   There, you found your prize: hope enough to make your transgression worthwhile.

            You would gladly have given up your life, to open to your sister the world she had only the barest glimpses of, even with all your efforts.  You loved her enough, and you had already so many days out in the breeze and amidst the flowers, days she should have had part in.  You were Konoha born and bred, and did not fear sacrifice.   But you could not manipulate the chakra patterns of your own mind and remain coherent enough to carry the operation through.  And Sakura was right there, ever sleeping, dead to the world.   The chakra paths of her mind were frayed nets and sundered patterns.  Broken and tattered as they were, her body and spirit could not bring them to any order.  So you told yourself as you stepped off the precipice and descended into the abyss.  Tsukina was out of time.

            You found that the legends had not lied.  The lost, the forgotten, the dead - they were not beyond the call of a hero willing to brave the dark.  But in that dark, who could say whose hand you had grasped, when you ran back for the light?   The girl everyone calls Sakura awoke.  But what lay behind her eyes, you could not say.  You could still feel the twin-bond you had with Tsukina, now linked to a new face.   And yet, when you sought the speech-beyond-speaking, you were met only with silence.   You were alone in a way you had not ever been before.

            You sought solace in company, and adopted Sakura as your new sister.   Tsukina would not begrudge you that, and you owed it to the pink haired girl.  She was your responsibility, as much as she was her mother’s.  The tales had taught you that much, and you dared not falter now, when you had already walked into places you were not meant to tread and returned with a trophy despite the impossibility of it.  Sakura was strange and familiar all at once, so close in body and mind and yet forever a part of her out of your reach.  Whatever your work had done, there was something of Tsukina in her, and she warmed your soul almost as much as your birth-sister had with her smile, and lit up your world with curiosity and cleverness both surprising and yet natural.  If you did not have all of Tsukina with you, you decided, you had enough.  That was all that mattered.  Sakura was sister enough, filling a part of your heart you had not even known.   Many had lived and loved without knowing the intimacy you once had.  You could do as they did.

            It never occurred to you that you had stolen your new sister until she followed you into the shadows.  You would have been lost without her, but you were all the more terrified when she announced she would enter the academy with you, her mother standing behind her with a broken heart painted across her face.  You had always known you would one day be a Kunoichi, a thief of hearts and secrets and lives.  But even before you had taken up the Hita-ite, you had already taken all these things, unknowing, unthinking.  How could your sister ever forgive you, if you told her what you had done?  How could you call her your sister, if you did not?  You had transgressed against everyone you had known and loved.  You feared they day you would be completely and truly alone.

            And then, one day, you weren’t alone anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that might answer a few questions.


End file.
